Wednesday, 11 March 2015

CAUGHT BY THE CODGERS

Lots of things get the blame for the mediocrity of the Englandlteam - foreigners, tiredness, the heat, the rotation of the earth, - but one group that generally escape censure are
the codgers at Victoria Park. They may not be the finger-pointers'
most fashionable target, but I believe they have played almost as big a part in the decline of the national team as imports, lack of primary school coaches and the fact our
players are crap.

The codgers congregate just by
the halfway line in the Mill House Paddock. They wear flat caps and car coats,
give off the scent of Yardley's and throat lozenges and teeter permanently on
the brink of exasperation. It is said that the attention spans of today's
youngsters have been shortened by a diet of video clips and computer games. It
seems the endless catchphrases of ITMA and Take It From Here had a similar
effect on the codgers' generation. Formative years spent listening to Dorothy
Summers squawking, "I've just popped by to dust the mayor's knick-knacks"
have left them with no patience for the intricate. To them subtlety is just a
posh word for "fannying about".

When Chris Turner and Danny Wilson were in
charge, Hartlepool played a neat, attractive game based on passing and
movement. It has carried the club to previously undreamed of heights, but it
did not wash with the codgers. When the home side had the temerity to string
three passes together without lumping the ball into the penalty area as a
finale, the codgers erupted in indignant rage. "For Christ's sake, Pools,"
they bellowed, "Get on with it. Get it in the box. What's the matter with
you?" The score, or the time, or Pools' league position, was immaterial. In
the minds of the codgers the team is always 0-1 down with a minute to play in a
relegation six-pointer - for them the situation is always critical, the seconds running out.

I have singled out the codgers at
Victoria Park, but the truth is, of course, that there are codgers yelping in
frustration at most English football grounds. More damaging still, every
English football fan has a little codger that is constantly
battling - sleeves rolled up, jaw set, studs showing - to get out. Thus while I
may have murmured appreciation for the cerebral skills of Günter Netzer and
Giancarlo Antognoni down the years, my inner codger has ensured that I am never
quite able to shake off the feeling that when applied to a midfielder the word
"elegant" is a synonym for "lazy", that
"cultured" is a euphemism for "gutless".

It is easy enough to hold the
inner codger in check when nothing is at stake. That is why in polls English fans
constantly ignore the claims of belligerent ball winners or knobbly-kneed
centre-backs with blood oozing from a gash above their eyebrows and instead
name twinkle-toed wingers or deft inside-forwards as their club's best-ever
player.

Once inside the ground it is a
different matter, however. Aroused by the smell of onions, the cries of the
golden goal ticket sellers and mounting anxiety, the inner codger elbows and
ankle-taps his way into control. Suddenly men who were earlier exalting Argentina's
24-pass goal against Serbia and Montenegro as the acme of football excellence
are rising to their feet and bellowing "Get into them//fuck them up!"
at the top of their lungs.

It hardly needs saying that this chant is not conducive to progressive
play. "Get your foot on the ball/and then look up" might be a better
exhortation for those who name Ginola or Juninho as their inspiration, but we are
unlikely ever to hear it. "Get up his arse", "Clean his
clock", "Get rid", howl the crowd - gripped round the nads by
their inner codgers. Unless we can shake them off, frankly England are going nowhere, and not nearly directly enough either.

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About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.